Columns

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 25 July 2009

Have you ever played fireball hockey? God, what a fantastic game! You wrap a bog roll in chicken wire, douse it in paraffin, set fire to it and then play hockey with it — preferably while drunk and wearing black tie, as I was lucky enough to do myself three years ago in front of the officers’ mess at the Norfolk HQ of the Light Dragoons. I’d been invited by their then CO, Lt Col Robin Matthews, who’d liked my book How To Be Right and wanted me to give his officers a pep talk. He explained: ‘A lot of these chaps are painfully aware how much money all their non-army friends are making [Gosh! That dates this story, doesn’t it?] and knowing you’re such a fan of the military I thought you could help remind them why they’re there.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 18 July 2009

Spike Milligan lives. I encountered him last week among the Australian military contingent at Camp Holland: a Dutch-led base in southern Afghanistan, in the province next to Helmand. Corporal Milligan, to be precise. But everyone calls him Spike. And though I’ve no reason to think he is or could be a fine singer or a world-famous comedian, Corporal Milligan has his famous namesake’s enthusiasm, optimism and punch. I met him as part of a small posse of visiting journalists, the guests of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and Nato. Our hosts were keen to show us the good work being done by the military to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, and the Australian-run Trade Training School at Camp Holland is something of a showcase.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 11 July 2009

The worry is not that the new head of MI6 is on Facebook. It’s that he looked such a berk It’s the Speedos photograph, isn’t it? That’s the real killer on the Facebook page of the wife of Sir John Sawers, ‘C’, the new head of MI6. The one of her and her daughter doing a burlesque act isn’t great, and the one of her brother with the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving raises its own very special questions, but it’s the Speedos that really make you wince. Because they’re not just any old Speedos, are they? No, they’re the same Speedos, almost down to the piping, that Daniel Craig is wearing when he comes swaggering out of the sea in Casino Royale. They’re James Bond’s Speedos. You know the full body cringe?

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 11 July 2009

Quite possibly the greatest moment of my life so far — better perhaps even than pills in the late 1980s or riding to hounds on Exmoor or getting into Oxford or finding that the huge purple mite I’d discovered clinging to my left testicle during a cold bucket shower in the Western Sudan appeared not to have done any lasting damage — was watching Boy play cricket in a school house match the other week. Like me, I’m half-proud to say, Boy is a total spaz at cricket. But I’m only half-proud to say it because obviously there’s another part of me that would love him to be captaining the first XI, like I dearly wish I’d done when I was at school.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 4 July 2009

It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds No columnist should read too much into online responses to what he has written. No more than those who call in to radio phone-in programmes are those who post their comments online representative of readers as a whole — let alone the population as a whole. But I try to read properly the letters readers write or the comments they post online, because the sample of those moved to respond, though unrepresentative, is significant. It may tell you something about way the wind blows. So were I a Conservative MP I would have been depressed to scan the online response from Times readers to a column I wrote there last week.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 27 June 2009

There was no mistaking the sadistic zeal with which Labour MPs bounded into the lobbies to vote for John Bercow on Monday. The whole election had been an unexpected gift to them: a chance to foist on David Cameron a Speaker who is loathed by the Conservative party. When Mr Bercow promised to serve ‘no more than nine years’, the scale of the prize became clearer still: a trick played upon the Tories that could last until the summer of 2018. It was scarcely plausible that Margaret Beckett would occupy the post for so long. From that moment, the race was Bercow’s. History has been made, insofar as Mr Bercow is perhaps the first Speaker ever to be chosen on account of his unpopularity and lack of authority.

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 27 June 2009

I remember a colleague’s leaving party a couple of years ago. He slagged off virtually the whole newspaper in his speech, but he didn’t mention me. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, afterwards, taking me fondly by the arm. ‘You were in the first draft. I was going to stick you in the nepotism bit, just after Giles Coren.’ Don’t worry, I sighed, putting a brave face on it. It’s the thought that counts. It’s always good to get a mention. When Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei gave his big ‘save the regime’ speech last Friday, I didn’t really expect him to bother with us.

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 27 June 2009

A friend who teaches at an old-fashioned Sussex boarding school has a zero-tolerance approach to racism. The moment he hears one of the foreign boys claiming to be a victim of it, that’s them chucked out of the class for the rest of the lesson. ‘Well I’m sorry,’ says my friend Duncan, quite unapologetically. ‘But they’re bright kids and they’re enjoying the best education money can buy in a multi-ethnic school where racism just isn’t an issue. I think it’s an absolute bloody outrage that they should try that line…’ Had he been working in the state sector, of course, he would be out of his job by now. Which is an awful pity because people of Duncan’s courage and robust convictions are what the world sorely needs.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 20 June 2009

George Osborne was in bed when he heard Andrew Lansley on breakfast radio last week discussing health spending. It was an unremarkable story about Labour’s budgets, with no hint of the political bombshell about to drop. The shadow health secretary was saying that the Tories would increase health spending — which is, of course, official party policy. But to pay for it, Mr Lansley announced matter-of-factly that all other departments under a Tory government would have to suffer a budget cut of about 10 per cent. Suffice to say that Mr Osborne did not get much more sleep after that.

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 20 June 2009

By this weekend most people won’t remember the details of, and some won’t remember at all, the exchange of emails between Lord Mandelson and the former Labour blogger Derek Draper, which took place in 2008 and before Mandelson joined Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, but which was leaked to a Sunday newspaper two weeks ago. What lingers is the vague impression that Mandelson thinks Mr Brown an awkward public performer, and perhaps a conflicted private personality. These impressions will have sunk quietly into that great national collective unconscious where current opinions find their roots without our even knowing it.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 13 June 2009

Each time the BNP has to tone down its rhetoric, it’s a victory for everyone else It’s oddly unsettling, watching the media establishment trying to deal with the BNP. On Channel 4 News the other night, Krishnan Guru-Murthy was interviewing Andrew Brons, the thinner of their two toadish, loathsome MEPs, and I’m not sure that his impartiality really shone through. He had Margaret Hodge in the other chair, which didn’t help of course, because when that stricken Air France jet plunged out of the sky above the Atlantic last week, it probably sounded less shrill than Hodge at her most calm. Still, there was an edge of apoplexy there, which Guru-Murthy was fighting, and failing, to contain.

James Delingpole

You know it makes sense

Let’s not get too worked up if Guy Gibson’s dog ends up with a PC name This week’s vexed columnar question: should Guy Gibson’s dog still be called Nigger in The Dam Busters remake? Some of you no doubt think you know already what my line will be. And it’s true that as a second world war enthusiast of the retired-blustering-colonel persuasion, I am indeed the sort of fellow who spits in his gin when filmmakers take liberties with the period. When Steven Spielberg made out in Saving Private Ryan that the Americans won D-Day on their own, that was annoying.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 6 June 2009

We call it ‘antiquity’. And yet, in this imperial Roman city, it seemed like yesterday Call to mind London’s Regent Street. Suppose it straight, not curved. Suppose it about the same width but more than twice as long: a mile and a quarter. Picture it lined on each side not with shop fronts but with richly carved marble columns, more than 2,000 of them, approaching the height of Regent Street’s roof line. Top those columns with supporting massive, decorated stone lintels laid across. Picture the street paved not with tarmac but with stone slabs rutted with the grooves of a million cart and carriage wheels. Imagine it as the Champs Elysées of an imperial Roman city.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 30 May 2009

Clearly they should just have a different Speaker every time. Like on Have I Got News For You? since they sacked Angus Deayton. Do you remember the one with Sir Trevor Mcdonald? Brilliant. Because we never saw it coming, did we? We all thought, well, they just need to find the right man, somebody with a suitable terse wit, and who isn’t going to appear on the front of the News of The World in the sort of grainy photographs that one now vaguely expects to show a young George Osborne. But no. Turned out you didn’t need a full-time frontman after all. Give them the jokes and a child could do it. Even Neil Kinnock. So why not do the same with the great topical news quiz of SW1? A different celebrity every day. For some reason, the first one that springs to mind is Johnny Vegas.

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 30 May 2009

‘Bugger,’ says my delightful eight-year-old daughter, dancing round my desk. ‘Bugger, Daddy. Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ ‘Don’t say that word darling, it’s really unattractive,’ I say. ‘You use it, Daddy. I learned it from Coward on the Beach,’ says daughter, gleefully looking up the offending word, which isn’t difficult, because it’s the second one in the book. All right, so I swear. Probably more than is good for me.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 23 May 2009

Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel Do you believe in ghosts? I wish I did, for were I to entertain the flimsiest hope that some relic of a personality could haunt a place where once they were, then I should not have slept a wink last night, for the thrill of who might linger. But I slept soundly in Agatha Christie’s bedroom. T.E. Lawrence slept next door. Where am I? Well, if I tell you that any visiting Madame Arcati would expect to contact — besides those two — Field Marshall Lord Slim, Lord Hore-Belisha, H.V. Morton, María Teresa de Borbón and Princess Eugénie of Greece, do you begin to guess? Did I mention Peter, Prince of Greece, or Dr Schacht, the Nazis’ banker?

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 23 May 2009

It is typical of Michael Martin that his laughably short resignation statement contained a fundamental misunderstanding of parliament. ‘This House is at its very best when it is united,’ he said. The precise opposite is true. Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s places are precisely two sword lengths apart because it is intended to be an adversarial system. When the Commons chamber was bombed in 1941, Churchill rejected plans to rebuild it in a more collegiate semi-circular format. ‘We shape our buildings,’ he said, ‘But then our buildings shape us.’ Churchill understood that the slightest change in parliament, from the architecture to the rule book, alters the balance of power.

Saturday

Martin Bright

Politics | 16 May 2009

The Labour party now has three weeks to save itself from oblivion. The only question facing MPs is whether the open fratricide that would follow a challenge to Gordon Brown would be preferable to the death by a thousand humiliating cuts if the Prime Minister sits tight at Number 10. The European and local council elections on 4 June have been as good as written off by the party. Beyond the Prime Minister’s inner circle there is now a tangible fury at Gordon Brown, with the Damian McBride affair, the Gurkha fiasco and the expenses scandal merely reinforcing what they knew already about the Prime Minister. Where there was once grudging respect and then pity there is now barely disguised disdain.

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 16 May 2009

I don’t bait greens only for fun. I do it because they’re public enemy number one If only you could have seen the gratitude in my guinea pigs’ eyes just now. At least I think it was gratitude. It’s hard to be totally sure with those blank, dead, black staring eyes which, let’s be honest, aren’t noticeably more intelligent or expressive than a (very small) great white shark’s. Even so, if Pickles Deathclaw and Lily Scampers could speak, I like to think that what they would have said is this: ‘Thank you, human. You are so kind and generous and nurturing.

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 16 May 2009

All that has really changed is that we’re all angry now. It isn’t just students who are cross I’m worried that we are running out of people to hate. It’s all moving too fast. In the space of just a few months, we’ve had bankers and the BBC and the police and now MPs. What’s left for the summer? It’s barely 18 months since we did the House of Lords; we can’t possibly do them again already. Nurses? Trains? Traffic wardens? Something more left-field? A summer of hate against the RSPCA? Mind you, maybe I’m being too hasty. Because, and humour me here, just close your eyes and try to imagine a copy of the Daily Telegraph. Look at the headline. It’s about MPs’ expenses, isn’t it?